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Reccently I purchased two FPGA development boards. These are both very low cost. the Avnet S3A Spartan 3A Evaluation kit ($50) and the Actel Igloo Nano Starter Kit ($55). To test these boards, I bought a I2S DAC board from Eric Brombaugh.

While the spartan 3A board is more powerful, the igloo has the advantage of built in flash, lower power usage, and cheaper parts. The smaller igloo devices can be purchased from $5-$15 each from mouser. Another cool thing about the Igloo board is that is comes with a programmer stick that is compatible with Actel’s FlashPro programmer/software. I’d like to make some digital modules for my synth with these. First will probably be an update to my VCDO design which used a dspic.

I setup a simple I2S DAC test using Eric Brombaugh’s verilog code for the Spartan S3A board. I ported this to the igloo board and it works just the same.